A wheezing, lurching contraption. Something hand-painted and puttering along, people in cars yelling through open windows at the bearded, bespectacled driver — “Get off the road, idiot!” — because the bike is moving quite a few beats below the speed limit.

Please, reconsider.

Electric motorcycle.

Long and low, black and orange. A wasp carapace forged from steel. Five hundred horsepower. Ten-inch-wide rear tire. From zero to 60 mph in less than a second. Nearly 170 miles per hour in a quarter-mile.

KillaCycle.

It’s the fastest electric vehicle in the world, and the life’s work of Bill Dube, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration engineer. Dube built the KillaCycle, a motorcycle, in his Wheat Ridge garage. He spends nearly all of his free time and money on the bike.

“I’ve been doing this for years, and now I’m an overnight success,” says Dube, 55, a goateed, cheerful guy whose spare, compact house and gigantic garage serve the aim of making the electric motorcycle faster, faster, faster.

In the kitchen, on the floor, spread across the coffee table — wires, batteries, copper doodads, electronic gizmos. In the garage, much more of the same, as well as tires, melted motors and the KillaCycle itself, a sprawl of metal intransigence.

There is nothing dorky about KillaCycle.

But Dube?

Let’s examine how he describes himself.

“We are the nerds’ nerds, the nerd king and queen,” he says, referring to himself and his girlfriend, Eva Hakansson, 27, a Swede studying engineering at CU who joins Dube in spinning a healthy portion of her life around the pursuit of fast electric vehicles. “I have groupies, but they have ham radios and pocket protectors,” Dube says.

“When I was 4, I built a (model) nuclear reactor with cardboard boxes and cans,” offers Hakansson.

Dube is a manic tinkerer, an “EV geek,” he says. In the small and frothy world of electric racing machines, EV means “electric vehicle,” and in that petite universe, Dube says, “we are whales.”

Before becoming nerd king, or an EV whale, Dube, a Rhode Island native, had worked as a foreign-car-repair specialist, a locksmith and an electrician.

Later, he received a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado, and then took at job at NOAA, where he says he designs and builds instruments, many of which are related to studying hurricanes.

In the mid-1990s he got involved with EVs “just for kicks,” he says. But kicks quickly turned into obsession.

He converted a Volkswagen Cabriolet into a car that runs entirely on electricity and decided to race it. On his first try, during a race in Oregon, he blew up the transmission. At the starting gate. The Cabriolet was his commuting car; it still is.

“A purpose-built vehicle”

KillaCycle was born out of the blown transmission.

“I had to make a purpose-built vehicle,” says Dube. “I could not afford a dragster (car) and I didn’t have the room in my garage for one, so I decided to build the KillaCycle. While towing my broken electric VW from Oregon to Denver, I thought up the name and did the original basic design work in my head.”

In 1999, he finished KillaCycle, started racing, and the machine, ridden by someone else, set a world record for the quarter-mile at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison. Dube’s vehicle has been breaking its own records ever since.

Dube is also one of the godfathers of EV drag racing — this includes cars and motorcycles — developing safety rules for the sport, helping create the National Electric Drag Racing Association, and more.

At this point, the bike consumes 60 hours a week or more of Dube’s time. The dedication is paying off in notoriety but not money — Dube dumps about $20,000 a year into the motorcycle.

KillaCycle holds a world record for miles per hour in the quarter- mile for any electric vehicle, including cars. The bike reached 168 mph during a race in California last year and finished the quarter-mile in 7.824 seconds.

“I call him ‘Super Bill Dube’ because he really pushes the envelope,” says John Bryan, 44, a Boulder EV enthusiast who got started making electric vehicles about the same time as Dube. “He’s an open book, technologically. He doesn’t keep any secrets, and he’s eager to help.”

And while he also is extremely competitive — get Dube talking about the KillaCycle (it doesn’t take much prodding), and he’ll go on about the new battery he’s getting — battery technology, he says, is the key to progress in electric vehicles — how he plans to build another bike to tear across the Bonneville Salt Flats, and so on. He becomes even more animated talking about electric vehicles and energy conservation.

He drives the 1985 VW Cabriolet — he calls it the “Electwik Wabbit” — to work and back every day. The red- and-yellow car is silent and plugs into a socket each night. It costs pennies to run. The motor is much different from an internal-combustion engine — among other things, it doesn’t get nearly as hot.

Dube says he rarely does anything with his car, maintenance-wise. He just juices it with electricity and goes.

With Chevrolet set to release its electric car, the Volt, in 2010, Dube is hopeful.

“For EVs to make a difference, you have to sell them,” he says. “A nerd- mobile or a traveling science project won’t cut it. Guilt will only sell you so many cars.”

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